Stefan Mileschin

Azure not suffering from coronavirus blues

Software king of the world Microsoft said that its Azure Cloud has been growing like topsy since the coronavirus forced millions of people to work from home.

Vole claims there has been a huge increase in Teams usage, and there are now over 44 million daily users.

In regions where there are isolation and home sheltering orders in place, Microsoft saw a 775 percent increase in usage of its cloud services. Microsoft insists that despite the surge in demand, there have not been any significant service disruptions.

Vole said there has been a threefold increase in use of Windows Virtual Desktop, presumably as more people are now working from home. The company said that government use of public Power BI to share COVID-19 dashboards with citizens has surged by 42 percent in a week.

Microsoft has increased the monitoring of services for certain key users, saying "our top priority remains support for critical health and safety organizations and ensuring remote workers stay up and running with the core functionality of Teams".

This prioritisation means that a few temporary restrictions have had to be introduced to help balance the “best possible experience.” This included limiting free offers, capping some resources for new subscribers, and pausing some features of Teams.

To help cope with the increased demand, there are plans to increase capacity:

A spokesVole said: “ We are expediting the addition of significant new capacity that will be available in the weeks ahead. Concurrently, we monitor support requests and, if needed, encourage customers to consider alternative regions or alternative resource types, depending on their timeline and requirements. If the implementation of these efforts to alleviate demand is not enough, customers may experience intermittent deployment related issues. When this does happen, impacted customers will be informed via Azure Service Health.”

Microsoft said that it is monitoring the impact Xbox Live has on Azure capacity, having already asked developers to push out game updates at off-peak times. The company has been working with ISPs, and steps have been taken to reduce bandwidth consumption by video services.

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